Pete Seeger died on Monday, January 27, 2014—the same day as my most recent blog entry—a musical post in honor of my Dad’s birthday.

Pete was and always will be an icon in American musical heritage. While pop and I were not musically endowed in terms of talent, we both loved music. And I loved Pete Seeger. I loved him from the first time his influence entered my life in the early 1960s—and through his efforts for peace, and through his successful work to save the polluted Hudson River—through his grand performance at President’s Obama’s inauguration, and to his death at the age of 94. And forever will I love Pete Seeger and his pure simple words to reconcile our differences, to work things out and to find a better way.

One of Pete’s observations was that the biggest thing to him in all of his long life was just to be link in a chain. What a metaphor. Links always work together. Links never work cross-wise to each other. If a link is broken, the entire chain fails with it.

Pete said, “The human race is going to realize it’s going to have to start treating each other decently.”

Watching Democracy Now[1] on the day after Pete’s death, I learned another lesson from Pete. He was explaining about his hit song “Turn, Turn, Turn”[2], about how the words are 2,256 years old and how the word Ecclesiastes means gatherer (as an orator does to teach).[3] And then Pete taught about the verse, “A time to kill, a time heal…” We are all descended from killers, Pete said. They were good killers, excellent killers, he explained, or we wouldn’t be here. But now, if we want the human chain of life to go on, we must learn how to stop killing.

Pete believed that children and women would lead the way.

I agree. That is why this is the way of Bentari.


Image: Pete Seeger in 1955[4]

Buy Bentari here and contact me at: Tim@Bentari.com

[1] See: http://www.democracynow.org/2014/1/28/we_shall_overcome_remembering_folk_icon “We Shall Overcome”: Remembering Folk Icon, Activist Pete Seeger in His Own Words & Songs

[2] Performance by Pete, The Byrds, others, many selections on Youtube at: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=turn+turn+turn+pete+seeger&sm=1

[3] See: http://www.definitions.net/definition/ecclesiastes

[4] See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pete_Seeger_NYWTS.jpg there are no known restrictions on this photo